Photoshop effects: Before and after
Working with Photoshop has been a part of my work since the 1990s, but I’ve only used a little of the software’s potential. I thought I’d see if I could take a picture of a house and turn it into something different.
I started with this photo from Wikipedia, of the house shown in the background of Grant Wood’s famous “American Gothic” painting:
I wanted to turn this into a haunted house, using characters from some silent scream classics. Here’s what I came up with:
For those unfamiliar with them, the characters are Lon Chaney as the man in the beaver hat from “London After Midnight”, at left; Charles Ogle as the monster in Thomas Edison’s “Frankenstein”, in the lower window; Conrad Veidt as Cesare and Lil Dagover as Jane in “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, right; and Max Schreck as Graf Orlok in “Nosferatu”, top window.
Page layout samples from Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction, Colo.
Sadly, I didn’t have the foresight to export digital copies of these pages years ago when they still existed in a database. What can I say? It’s been a few years and print was still king when I built these. Thanks to my friend and co-worker Christopher Tomlinson, chief photographer for GJSentinel.com, for shooting them for me.
Sam on the Scene
“Sam on the Scene” was a series of entertainment videos that appeared regularly on GJSentinel.com from 2007 to 2008. It was built around entertainment reporter Samantha Stiles, whose first professional job was with the Sentinel. We discontinued the series when it became too much of a struggle to figure out new places for Sam to visit.
Christopher Tomlinson’s photography
Photos by the longtime chief photographer for The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction, Colo. Chris Tomlinson has shot just about everything in the Grand Valley, moving or not.
The melodious sounds of a newborn … NOT
Originally published in September 2006, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.
The stupidest dream has entertained me for the last week or so. I imagine that my 3-week-old daughter can talk, and we have this conversation:
“Father,” she says courteously in a melodious voice, “I fear I have grown hungry again. Would you please ask Mother if she wouldn’t mind nursing me awhile? I’d approach her myself, but not being able to crawl and all, it might take me some time to catch up to her.”
“I’d be delighted,” I answer. “However, your mother is preoccupied with her daily shower just now. Might you wait a few minutes for her to finish?”
“Oh, no trouble at all,” she says. “In fact, I hate to be such a bother to begin with. Please don’t interrupt Mother until she’s dried her hair and eaten brunch.”
“Thank you. In the meantime, could you use a fresh diaper?”
“Well, I’m embarrassed to confess it, but as long as you’re asking, I COULD do with a fresh Huggie. Do you have time to accommodate me?”
“No trouble,” I answer.
We both smile as the dream ends, and then I wonder why I am now pleased with the “talking baby” fantasy I find so irritating in movies or commercials.
It probably has something to do with the way many of my real-world interactions with my new daughter go.
“WAAAAH! WAAAAH! HIC! WAAAAAAAH!”
“- Lisa! -”
“WAAAAAAAH! GULP! WA WA WA WAAAAAAAAH!”
“- get AWAY from me, Effie -” (Directed to our dog, whose sensitive ears probably jangle much more than mine when the baby cries.)
“WEEEEAAAAAAAH!”
Geez. Holding a baked potato fresh off a 500-degree grill is less challenging than struggling with a shrieking infant in your arms.
A baby won’t be reasoned with or tolerate a delay while you wash your hands. Once she’s started crying because she’s hungry or because she needs her diaper changed or because she needs to burp or because whatever (good luck figuring it out), she won’t let up until two minutes after she gets it.
When I told my wife it baffled me that the little ones who need us so much make a noise that drives us crazy, Lisa said they do it so we’ll put food in their mouths as quickly as possible in order to quiet them down.
How awful is it that this is what I have to say about the new little miracle in our family?
I’ve been a father close to six years, which means I still have plenty to learn about parenting (who doesn’t?). One thing I know for sure about myself, at least, is that the kids have exasperated me most when they’re smallest.
This probably doesn’t say much good about me, especially when one considers all the extra demands motherhood has piled on my wife.
When was the last time Lisa got a full night’s uninterrupted sleep? A full night without having to deal with some kind of issue with one of our daughters?
Years. No kidding.
Fortunately, our baby isn’t always crying. Sometimes she sleeps.
And sometimes she’s just neat, which reminds me of all the things I like about kids. Sometimes she sits quietly in someone’s lap and looks around. The lamps, the trees, the furniture, her big sisters … it’s all new to her and she’s curious about it. That’s fun.
Sometimes she shows us she’s already learning, such as when she recently reached up to take hold of a bottle while she was being fed.
And sometimes, already, I look at her and know I don’t get to keep her forever.
Papers should catch messes, not be part of them
Originally published in September 2006, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.
Please, do me a favor. If you’re reading these words on a page spread out on some public restroom floor, pick it up and take it with you when you’re finished.
If you’re not interested in keeping the paper and there’s no recycle bin handy, then go ahead throw it in the trash.
Want to get my goat? Don’t bother telling me you’re going to line a birdcage with my column because I’m delighted to think my mug might be smiling under thousands of seed-stuffed parakeets. That’s a spectacular use of newsprint.
I keep a stack of old newspapers near my workbench and spatter them with paints and glues while working on model kits. Newspapers have caught the cast-off pieces of dozens of my daughters’ art projects. I’ve seen sheets of newspaper being used to protect just about every conceivable surface while work is being done nearby.
Saving carpets and tables from stains … perhaps that’s not noble, but it’s definitely handy. For only a couple of coins, anyone can have a decent-sized roll of flexible, mess-absorbing paper. What a bargain!
Plenty of experts think newspapers will have to evolve into Internet-based entities if they want to thrive in the 21st century and maybe that’s true, but if it is, I suspect a lot of things are going to get messed up in the future for lack of something to cover them with.
No, if you want to bug me, don’t do it by pointing out one beneficial alternative use for the product to which I’ve dedicated my professional life so far. It’s a good thing people turn to newspapers to prevent some nasty messes.
If you want to bug me, use the paper to make the nasty messes. Throw them in the back of your pickup and let them scatter when you drive, perhaps, or just decide they’re too cheap to bother toting around and leave them wherever you are.
Which brings me back to the floors of those public restrooms, fondly known by many as “reading rooms.” You might be in one this very moment, looking at my column because it was facing up on the page when the previous user dropped it.
I think people in general try to be basically polite to one another, so I don’t know what could inspire so many of us to just drop things for someone else to pick up later.
Even if it doesn’t come naturally, I’m sure most of us heard from someone when we were growing up that we should clean up after ourselves. My mother is the one who said it most to me.
Perhaps some of us consider it a courtesy of sorts to the next visitor to leave a newspaper spread out on the floor, but I suspect such people have never been in the position themselves of cleaning up after others. They’ve also probably never heard the sigh or seen the head shake of the custodian who has to pick up all those newspapers at day’s end.
I’ve heard that sigh, though, and seen that head shake, and felt pretty bad about only watching as a tired fellow stooped to pick up all those papers on the floor and deposited them in the trash – which was only a few feet away. The next day, and every day since, more papers covered the floor.
More than one of the jobs I’ve held put me in the position of actually being the person who sighed and shook his head. My bosses and I both thought I had better things to do than clean up messes that were made not because they had to be made or because of some accident, but because someone simply felt like making them. But it was me or nobody … and “nobody” is pretty much how I figured I was regarded by the people who put me in that position.
Welcome to the world outside
Originally published in September 2006, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.
Standing in the delivery room, with a neat bunch of people sewing my wife back together behind me, I watched another neat person checking out my baby girl. Quietly, I did the same thing I’d done with my previous two girls when they were newborns: Counted fingers and toes.
Hands are more important to me, so I started with them. Right – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Left – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Good so far, on to the feet. Right – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Left – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
All there, I reported to Lisa a couple minutes later. Our baby has all her parts, and judging by the crying, her lungs are healthy as well.
That, I figure, is as good a way to start things with a new family member as you’re going to get.
In fact, the whole day went about as well as it could, particularly considering how nervous Lisa and I were when we started it a few hours earlier.
Our baby had to be delivered by Caesarean section. We’d known for eight months this would be the case; for different reasons, our first two girls were C-section babies, so the third one would have to be as well. Naturally, even though she’d been through it before, the prospect of being opened up and having the baby pulled out didn’t appeal to Lisa, and I didn’t care for it either.
So, we got out of bed early and made brave faces while we traveled to St. Mary’s Hospital. The day I saw in front of me was one in which I figured the best I could do was not make a jerk of myself.
Lisa would spend the morning getting through surgery, then she’d spend the afternoon in pain, stuck in a strange bed with all kinds of tapes and tubes attached to her, and she’d have to do the most important beginning steps of parenting – feeding the baby.
My biggest problems would be getting a couple hours’ less sleep than I wanted and dealing with that disgusting first No. 2 diaper.
I hope that at 7:30 a.m. I was prepared to put on a reassuring face while at the same time standing up for my wife if she needed me … but I never had to find out. Things went well, and there are so many people to thank that I can’t possibly do it here. I won’t bring up names here, either, partially because I didn’t catch them all (disgraceful, I know), but more because I didn’t actually tell any of them I might write about them later.
First, the nurse who got Lisa ready for surgery threw me off guard by telling me she’d met my parents. I assumed she was wrong because my folks live 300 miles away … but she wasn’t. They’d stopped at her house when they were visiting about a year ago and bought peaches from her. Amazing.
The aforementioned neat group of people who did the surgery were the ones we feared most, and I can’t describe how many ways they made it go well. I half suspect the midwife, who has been Lisa’s primary caregiver through all three pregnancies, warned everyone about us.
The high point of the C-section was when the anesthesiologist helped Lisa hold up a mirror so she could watch our baby being delivered. Despite all she was going through, Lisa was thrilled. I wanted to look myself, but feared the blood would inspire me to make a spectacle of myself, so I stayed where I was.
During the rest of our hospital stay, we encountered many more people who humbled me by doing their jobs so well. Not only did they keep an eye on my wife and baby, but also on me, the least important person in the room.
One generous woman even put together a gift pack of hospital doodads for my older girls and made their day even better.
Sometimes it’s a bad idea to pretend you’re a cat
Originally published in August 2006, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.
Every single day, the beautiful, intelligent, energetic little blond-haired, blue-eyed girl sharing our roof proves she’s an expert at making Daddy pound his forehead against the fireplace. She’s even better at this than her mommy, even though our girl only just turned 3.
One of the many things I’ve learned from my daughters is any parent who speaks only of the joys of children is probably leaving something out.
Our 3-year-old, the younger of the two, likes to pretend she’s a cat. Most of the time I just figure, “OK.” Sometimes I play along, rubbing her behind the ears while she purrs (first time we did this, her purring sounded more like blowing raspberries and I had to wipe the spray off my glasses).
But every now and then, she chooses to meow at really bad times. For example, when we’re getting ready to head out the door in a hurry (which we seem to do at least twice every day), it’s in bad form to insist upon meowing her answer when I ask, “Did you go potty?” It’s an even worse idea to drop on all fours and slowly head to the bathroom after I finally drag a “no” out of her.
A few days ago, I looked down at a red spot on my blue shirt – ketchup that dripped from my hamburger – then looked over at the mustard and mayo dotting my daughter’s clothes. And I didn’t much care, because I now accept stains happen.
If you’ve got a little kid at the table and you’re not willing to put up with blotches all over her skin and clothing, then you have to help her out from time to time. You have to reroll burritos before beans flop in her lap. You have to intercept her hand with a napkin before she wipes it on her dress. You have to remind her and remind her and remind her to eat over her plate. You have to create a dam for spilled milk before it flows over the table and onto her.
While doing all this, you’ll spill some of your own food on yourself. If you manage not to, then the stuff on her will get on you when you pick her up later. There’s no getting around it.
Bedtime is the worst. Being a lot like me, our daughter’s sleep requirements are like mine were at her age … which means she doesn’t need much. She gets so interested in other things that she usually takes about a minute short of forever to drop off every night.
My wife and I will sit in the living room, passing time while we wait for our girl to finish singing, chatting with her dolls, reciting the poem her big sister made up (“I have a little pony, Her name is Little Grey, I bought her at the barbershop, And now I go away”) or begging us to refill her water cup.
Every night, I think I’ll be able to work on a model kit or start the next great American novel after our child gets to sleep, and every night I run out of energy before she does.
Yeah, this stuff gets old.
But man, what’s harder to describe are the things that make the frustrations so worth it. It’s stuff that’s good – great, even – but a lot of people probably wouldn’t get it.
Like over the weekend. We’re working on teaching our girl how to behave at church and she struggles. The reason for the struggle is obvious: Church is boring, she doesn’t want to sit still. I have the same problem.
But one moment – one quiet moment – we looked at each other during the service and her eyebrows went up.
“I’m being good,” she whispered. Sounded like a statement, but it was a question.
I nodded, smiled, whispered, “Yes you are, sweetheart.”
That was all she needed to hear. Her grin was so big it lifted her shoulders to her ears, then she rewarded me with a kiss on the cheek.
So worth it.
Girls share thoughts about upcoming new sister
Originally published in August 2006, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, CO.
The clock has ticked us into the last few days of my wife’s pregnancy. Our first two daughters had to be delivered by C-section, which means our third one has to be as well. So, unless the baby surprises us with an early arrival, she’ll come home Labor Day weekend.
Lisa looks forward to the pains that come with taking care of a newborn at the same time she’s recovering from major surgery because she figures it can’t be as uncomfortable as being nine months pregnant in August.
The baby’s birth is what I’d anticipate being the “biggest” thing our family’s got coming this year, but life has been full of milestones of late. If it wasn’t this, it might be moving to a new home, or more likely our older girl starting school.
Obviously, our girls are paying attention. One just turned 3, the other’s getting close to 6, and they’re both waiting to see what this new sister will bring to the house.
I took a few minutes to ask them some questions over the weekend while they were playing in our back yard.
First, the 5-year-old sat on the grass next to my lawn chair. We’ve done many “interviews” and she enjoys them.
What would you name your sister? I asked.
“Mary Asena,” she said.
What most excites you about your new sister?
“That I might be able to beat her with a bottle.”
WHAT?
“That I might be able to feed her with a bottle.”
Oh … FEED. My ears are getting just as old as the rest of me.
What are you most worried about?
“That her poop will smell.” She grimaced. “So yucky.”
Do you know your mommy and I love you and always will?
She nodded.
The 3-year-old agreed to be interviewed as well, but she wanted me to do it while she was swinging.
Are you happy or sad that you’re going to have a new sister?
“Happy.”
What most excites you about having a baby?
The answer took awhile to figure out. What it amounted to was that she looked forward to giving the baby a bath in our basement sink.
What would you name her?
“Dog Effie.” She answered this while looking at our dog, Effie, who was sniffing the grass near the swing set.
I also asked if she knew her mommy and I loved her, but she’d lost interest by then.
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